With so little attention given to soul on this blog, it seemed somehow wrong to just let things rest with the blue-eyed work of Dusty Springfield yesterday and, in any event, the brilliant artistry of her music led me flicking through the embarrassingly small soul section of my CD collection for something else to keep me in the mood. I didn’t have to look far and, when I put Sam Cooke’s Night Beat into the player I realised why I have so little soul to choose from – it’s just impossible to find much that’s as good as this.
Sam Cooke’s output was pretty extensive for someone whose life was as tragically short as his but, even with a couple of dozen albums to his name, nowhere is his astonishing voice, dripping with that matchless mix of beauty and heartfelt, tell-it-as-it-is emotion that I have always found to be the trademark of soul, more wonderfully, nakedly on show as here on Night Beat.
There is little to listen to on this album other than Sam Cooke’s voice. The accompaniments are sparse, discreet – there to support the voice or, at most, to complement it, but never to intrude upon its simple, unembellished beauty. Listen, for example, to ‘Lost and Lookin’’, almost a capella, with its bass and cymbals beating slowly, unobtrusively in the background as if they, too, have been hushed, awe-struck, by the spell of Sam Cooke’s voice. And what makes that voice so unique, so memorable, is the way it weaves its way through the music, bleeding out its innermost pain to you, in such an unadorned way, without ornamentation, without affectation. It creates an intense, lasting bond, a holy trinity, between itself, its music, and you.
Really good soul always has a feeling of improvisation about it – a feeling that the music is growing as it’s sung, each note dying for the next one to be born, music that breeds from within itself, and that draws you in there too, so you are a part its birth. This is the way Sam Cooke sings these songs, right from the opening lines of ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’, where his voice wavers and wanders, finding notes in unexpected, unexplored places – notes that touch just the right spot, showering you with emotion not by histrionics but, simply, by music.
Night Beat is a superbly structured album – songs that sneakily seduce you into sharing their sadness; songs that make you cry, that carry you along a journey of quiet, gentle sorrow but that don’t leave you depressed and yet, as if to assure you that all is ultimately well, farewell you with the album’s closer, the wonderfully upbeat ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’.
I can't help thinking that Night Beat is the album that the human soul, when it is at its most heartbroken and forlorn, would choose to take onto its desert island – not to wallow in its misery but rather because then, with Sam Cooke’s glorious artistry, it would at last feel understood and, despite its sadness, never really alone.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Never ending nor beginning - the soul of Dusty Springfield
Even now, forty years later, I can remember how spooked I was as a child by Dusty Springfield singing 'Windmills of your mind'. There was just something about the way its melody, its tonality, its flow, captured the endless, aimless spin of the words. Whenever I heard it, it always left me unsettled; but I could never, ever, flick the switch of my little transistor radio to turn it off.
And listening today to that song, which I have hardly heard at all in the last four decades, I am taken back, as music always seems to do, to that time and place when it first made such an impression upon me and, noticing little things that had skipped my attention before, I can see why it did, and why it still does. Its exotic, unconventional instrumentation, with strings and zither, and how at the line "the world is like an apple whirling silently in space" the violins turn into a psychedelic fuzz, haunted, mysterious, other worldly.
But 'Windmills of your mind' is only one song on what many people believe to be Dusty Springfield's greatest album, Dusty in Memphis. It's an album that is bursting at the seams with classics that still seem to define that blue-eyed soul, which, although growing from roots laid in America, never blossomed more beautifully or more elegantly than in the voice of the English Dusty. Whether it's in the swinging bounce of 'Son of a preacher man', or the sad and bluesy soul of 'No easy way down', or the gentle attempt to comfort you in 'Breakfast in bed', or the wistful 'Just one smile', Dusty's cool voice, hovering somewhere between pleading and tears, but never veering from the note, always touches something deep and enduring within you.
Mostly, these songs are pretty short but always Dusty Springfield turns them into little vignettes, little sketches of humanity that are full of a longing that you know will never really find rest. And yet in spite of its restlessness, or maybe even because of it, you just keep coming back to it.
Dusty in Memphis is one of those classics that will always be great, always special, always significant. It is music that endures because its soul, and its singer's soul, endure - taking you by the hand to places that always seem somehow hauntingly familiar, as if they have always been a part of you, and always will: "never ending, nor beginning ... as the images unwind, like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind".
It's always such a joy to rediscover old favourites as treasured and as wonderful as this.
And listening today to that song, which I have hardly heard at all in the last four decades, I am taken back, as music always seems to do, to that time and place when it first made such an impression upon me and, noticing little things that had skipped my attention before, I can see why it did, and why it still does. Its exotic, unconventional instrumentation, with strings and zither, and how at the line "the world is like an apple whirling silently in space" the violins turn into a psychedelic fuzz, haunted, mysterious, other worldly.
But 'Windmills of your mind' is only one song on what many people believe to be Dusty Springfield's greatest album, Dusty in Memphis. It's an album that is bursting at the seams with classics that still seem to define that blue-eyed soul, which, although growing from roots laid in America, never blossomed more beautifully or more elegantly than in the voice of the English Dusty. Whether it's in the swinging bounce of 'Son of a preacher man', or the sad and bluesy soul of 'No easy way down', or the gentle attempt to comfort you in 'Breakfast in bed', or the wistful 'Just one smile', Dusty's cool voice, hovering somewhere between pleading and tears, but never veering from the note, always touches something deep and enduring within you.
Mostly, these songs are pretty short but always Dusty Springfield turns them into little vignettes, little sketches of humanity that are full of a longing that you know will never really find rest. And yet in spite of its restlessness, or maybe even because of it, you just keep coming back to it.
Dusty in Memphis is one of those classics that will always be great, always special, always significant. It is music that endures because its soul, and its singer's soul, endure - taking you by the hand to places that always seem somehow hauntingly familiar, as if they have always been a part of you, and always will: "never ending, nor beginning ... as the images unwind, like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind".
It's always such a joy to rediscover old favourites as treasured and as wonderful as this.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Chilling to the xx
For some reason that probably says more about me than I would care to admit, I often identify music less by its genre than by the type of drink that seems to go with it the best. When you listen to Pearl Jam or Rage Against the Machine, you just feel it would be wrong to drink anything other than beer. You really can't mix Nick Cave with anything other than rum, and Tom Waits begs to washed down with a good whisky. And Grizzly Bear just demands a nice chardonnay with subtle hints of different flavours and aromas and after-tastes. Madonna would probably lead you to a really bright green cream-based cocktail.
So, when I listened for the first time a couple of nights ago to the relatively new London based band, the xx, I didn't think so much of dream pop and chillout as about the fact that I had no idea how to make a martini.
The xx's self-titled debut album was released in August last year. The music here is soft, understated, whispered - music that walks its fingers over your body as you lie beneath a summer evening sky, giving you that faint little warm tingle that feels so good when you need to put the day's, and the world's, craziness behind you.
Every song on this album is superbly, carefully crafted, as if by a sculptor, where even the jagged edges are noticed not for their roughness, but for their interesting texture.
The vocals of Romy Madley Craft and Oliver Sim are hushed and sensual, dreamy, against guitars, beats and keys that build eloquent, sunset-hued landscapes, painted in ways that landscapes have never been painted before, where foreground and background are merged. Listen to the languid sliding bass electronics at the end of 'Fantasy', easing into the faltering, hesitating 'Shelter', sounding like the earth holding its breath for fear of waking you from the dream into which it has lulled you.
The xx give their music a lot of air, spacious without being sparse. The beat is slow, but never drags, the music giving each note time to be appreciated before moving onto the next one, and yet it never loses its sense of easy, flowing momentum, like in the long vocal phrases against pulsating guitars and beats in 'Infinity', building in a seductive crescendo that embraces you and then lays you gently down.
Xx takes you into another space - a world that is full of dreams and, like most dreams, seems both familiar and foreign at the same time. It's a place, and an album, that you really don't want to leave.
Discovered on the shelves of Melbourne's Polyester Records.
So, when I listened for the first time a couple of nights ago to the relatively new London based band, the xx, I didn't think so much of dream pop and chillout as about the fact that I had no idea how to make a martini.
The xx's self-titled debut album was released in August last year. The music here is soft, understated, whispered - music that walks its fingers over your body as you lie beneath a summer evening sky, giving you that faint little warm tingle that feels so good when you need to put the day's, and the world's, craziness behind you.
Every song on this album is superbly, carefully crafted, as if by a sculptor, where even the jagged edges are noticed not for their roughness, but for their interesting texture.
The vocals of Romy Madley Craft and Oliver Sim are hushed and sensual, dreamy, against guitars, beats and keys that build eloquent, sunset-hued landscapes, painted in ways that landscapes have never been painted before, where foreground and background are merged. Listen to the languid sliding bass electronics at the end of 'Fantasy', easing into the faltering, hesitating 'Shelter', sounding like the earth holding its breath for fear of waking you from the dream into which it has lulled you.
The xx give their music a lot of air, spacious without being sparse. The beat is slow, but never drags, the music giving each note time to be appreciated before moving onto the next one, and yet it never loses its sense of easy, flowing momentum, like in the long vocal phrases against pulsating guitars and beats in 'Infinity', building in a seductive crescendo that embraces you and then lays you gently down.
Xx takes you into another space - a world that is full of dreams and, like most dreams, seems both familiar and foreign at the same time. It's a place, and an album, that you really don't want to leave.
Discovered on the shelves of Melbourne's Polyester Records.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Jay Reatard RIP
Jay Reatard’s sudden and still unexplained death last week, at the age of 29, shot an enormous shockwave amongst his fans and friends and family and yet, it seems, sent little more than a tremor through the world’s broader music stage. It’s not that people didn’t like his mad, frenetically turbo-charged garage punk enough; it’s just that not enough people knew it.
I still don’t quite understand how some music, and some musicians, seem to capture the attention of the spotlight so quickly, and others don’t. If it had anything to do with the creativity and inspiration and talent of the artist, Jay Reatard’s passing would have registered on the music world’s Richter scale every bit as loudly, every bit as violently, as does his music in the veins of anyone who listens to it.
But it was enough, at least, to inspire me to plunge into his debut solo album, Blood Visions.
Blood Visions is an album that fires its adrenalin and energy at you like bullets from a machine gun. None of its 15 songs last much more than a couple of minutes and some of them much less than that but each gives you such an instant hit that, by the end of the album, you feel you’ve just had 15 shots of Red Bull.
The whole album lasts for only around 30 minutes, but it hardly draws a breath, even between tracks, and neither do you. Its pace is relentless, but not even for a nanosecond does it lose its focus, its razor edge precision, where every note, every beat, is fired at you faster and sharper than laser light.
It’s astounding how much Jay Reatard manages to achieve in such tiny spaces of time, like the way the tonality unexpectedly descends a semitone, dragged down by its own weight, in ‘My Shadow’, or the way the vocals come at you like percussion in ‘Death Is Forming’ and ‘I See You Standing There’, or the ferocious sound wall that’s built at the end of ‘Oh It’s Such A Shame’, or the nail-biting dialogue between vocals and instrumentals in ‘Turning Blue’.
The album leaves you wired and breathless but, like Jay Reatard’s life, it is over far, far, far too soon. But what it produces in such a small snatch of time is so full of power and force that it’s enough to give you a black eye.
Blood Visions is sensationally good and grimy garage punk, and thanks to Melbourne’s Missing Link Records for its enthusiastic advocacy of the music of the insanely talented Jay Reatard – mourned far too soon, and far too little.
I still don’t quite understand how some music, and some musicians, seem to capture the attention of the spotlight so quickly, and others don’t. If it had anything to do with the creativity and inspiration and talent of the artist, Jay Reatard’s passing would have registered on the music world’s Richter scale every bit as loudly, every bit as violently, as does his music in the veins of anyone who listens to it.
But it was enough, at least, to inspire me to plunge into his debut solo album, Blood Visions.
Blood Visions is an album that fires its adrenalin and energy at you like bullets from a machine gun. None of its 15 songs last much more than a couple of minutes and some of them much less than that but each gives you such an instant hit that, by the end of the album, you feel you’ve just had 15 shots of Red Bull.
The whole album lasts for only around 30 minutes, but it hardly draws a breath, even between tracks, and neither do you. Its pace is relentless, but not even for a nanosecond does it lose its focus, its razor edge precision, where every note, every beat, is fired at you faster and sharper than laser light.
It’s astounding how much Jay Reatard manages to achieve in such tiny spaces of time, like the way the tonality unexpectedly descends a semitone, dragged down by its own weight, in ‘My Shadow’, or the way the vocals come at you like percussion in ‘Death Is Forming’ and ‘I See You Standing There’, or the ferocious sound wall that’s built at the end of ‘Oh It’s Such A Shame’, or the nail-biting dialogue between vocals and instrumentals in ‘Turning Blue’.
The album leaves you wired and breathless but, like Jay Reatard’s life, it is over far, far, far too soon. But what it produces in such a small snatch of time is so full of power and force that it’s enough to give you a black eye.
Blood Visions is sensationally good and grimy garage punk, and thanks to Melbourne’s Missing Link Records for its enthusiastic advocacy of the music of the insanely talented Jay Reatard – mourned far too soon, and far too little.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Back where I belong - Kasumi Trio
After the comfort and predictability – and, yes, I admit the fun, too – of Madonna yesterday, I thought I needed to get back into my more trusted discomfort zone today and delve into something a bit freaky.
And where better to go for that, as least when it comes to music, than Japan? And so I was delighted when today, rummaging once again through the shelves at Missing Link, I managed to stumble across a newly released album, called Oh! Gimme You, by someone called Kasumi Trio, a psych-folk band made up of bits of three other Japanese bands: the avant-garde folk oriented Tenniscoats, the psychedelic rock leaning LSD March, and krautrock-influenced noise rock band Fushitsusha.
I thought that seemed like an interesting enough combination to get me out of the dance steps that were still occasionally appearing today at inopportune moments. And as soon as I heard the gentle acoustic guitar embroidered by weird, eerie electric noise and a sort of droning voice half singing, half whispering, eschewing everything that is squarely grounded in Western tonality, I knew that I had found the sort of jolt that my musical sensibilities were looking for.
The album opens with the appropriately titled ‘first session’, music that gives you really only the barest bones indication of what you are in for, as if it is laying its cards on the table but not yet telling you how it will play its hand. Soft guitars and drums pluck and beat at random, while electronic sounds squeak and squawk around them. Already we know we are in a strange place where familiar and alien worlds come together, and talk.
Some of these tracks, freaky and weird as they are, are, at first, surprisingly accessible, like the utterly haunting but beautiful ‘Cabbage butterfly’, where a simple, strumming guitar is overlaid with what sounds like the noise of oceans and wind and bizarre bird cries, coming from another, dark and ghostly, world.
But the gentleness, and the accessibility, of these songs are deceptive. Beneath the smooth, placid surface disturbed, unsettled things rumble and murmur, like the way 'tokotoko patapata' seems to stroll along, calmly, easily, and innocently enough at first, to steadily plucked chords on the acoustic guitar, but then strays into a strange, weird fog where little spurts of electric noise change the shape and colour of old and familiar things, leaving strange shadows on the music of the guitar, which keeps plodding through it all, its gait ever so slightly thrown off-course; or like the way ‘Middle session’ seems to drive itself along at a pace that is both hushed and hair-raising, with its soft heartbeat drums, and creepy marriage of electric and acoustic guitar, sounding like they are whispering together, plotting sinister things. Or the way the spectral vocals of yu in ‘Summer is over’ sound like a haunted child, rocking, singing a soft lullaby, possessed by demons.
It’s this uncanny mix of the soft and comforting with the jagged and jarred that makes Oh! Gimme You such a fascinating and unsettling album. It’s like it is taking you into its arms, rocking you softly and peacefully, but whispering the stuff of nightmares into your ears as you fall asleep.
The material girl living in the material world seems so very, very far away.
And where better to go for that, as least when it comes to music, than Japan? And so I was delighted when today, rummaging once again through the shelves at Missing Link, I managed to stumble across a newly released album, called Oh! Gimme You, by someone called Kasumi Trio, a psych-folk band made up of bits of three other Japanese bands: the avant-garde folk oriented Tenniscoats, the psychedelic rock leaning LSD March, and krautrock-influenced noise rock band Fushitsusha.
I thought that seemed like an interesting enough combination to get me out of the dance steps that were still occasionally appearing today at inopportune moments. And as soon as I heard the gentle acoustic guitar embroidered by weird, eerie electric noise and a sort of droning voice half singing, half whispering, eschewing everything that is squarely grounded in Western tonality, I knew that I had found the sort of jolt that my musical sensibilities were looking for.
The album opens with the appropriately titled ‘first session’, music that gives you really only the barest bones indication of what you are in for, as if it is laying its cards on the table but not yet telling you how it will play its hand. Soft guitars and drums pluck and beat at random, while electronic sounds squeak and squawk around them. Already we know we are in a strange place where familiar and alien worlds come together, and talk.
Some of these tracks, freaky and weird as they are, are, at first, surprisingly accessible, like the utterly haunting but beautiful ‘Cabbage butterfly’, where a simple, strumming guitar is overlaid with what sounds like the noise of oceans and wind and bizarre bird cries, coming from another, dark and ghostly, world.
But the gentleness, and the accessibility, of these songs are deceptive. Beneath the smooth, placid surface disturbed, unsettled things rumble and murmur, like the way 'tokotoko patapata' seems to stroll along, calmly, easily, and innocently enough at first, to steadily plucked chords on the acoustic guitar, but then strays into a strange, weird fog where little spurts of electric noise change the shape and colour of old and familiar things, leaving strange shadows on the music of the guitar, which keeps plodding through it all, its gait ever so slightly thrown off-course; or like the way ‘Middle session’ seems to drive itself along at a pace that is both hushed and hair-raising, with its soft heartbeat drums, and creepy marriage of electric and acoustic guitar, sounding like they are whispering together, plotting sinister things. Or the way the spectral vocals of yu in ‘Summer is over’ sound like a haunted child, rocking, singing a soft lullaby, possessed by demons.
It’s this uncanny mix of the soft and comforting with the jagged and jarred that makes Oh! Gimme You such a fascinating and unsettling album. It’s like it is taking you into its arms, rocking you softly and peacefully, but whispering the stuff of nightmares into your ears as you fall asleep.
The material girl living in the material world seems so very, very far away.
Monday, January 18, 2010
In bed with my demon
At some stage we all have to confront our demons. Like a few years ago when I faced my pathological fear of heights and jumped out of a plane. Or a few days ago when I bought an album of bagpipe music (see 14th January). But probably no step has been harder for me to take than today when I walked up to the counter at JB Hi Fi with not one, but two, Madonna CDs in my hand, and didn’t even pretend that I was buying them for someone else.
It has been an unnerving experience. As Madonna’s second and possibly most popular album, Like a Virgin, blares through my speakers, and as I contemplate what on earth the neighbours must think of me, I find, totally against my will or power, that I am bopping and dancing around the house, looking for (but thankfully not finding) the itsy-bitsy shorts I used to wear to dance parties, where the right mix of chemicals was able to make both my body and my dancing much more presentable than either were even then, let alone now.
There’s something pretty sinister about this music, the way it makes you do these things you wouldn’t normally do – twisting and jumping in ways that you never would think you would do, singing along to songs that you never would admit to knowing; the way it makes you forget your old, tired, decrepit bones and joints, and perform all those dance manoeuvres that are probably actually responsible for your current state of orthopaedic ruin.
While I’m not going to pretend that I have found new depths in this music or new dimensions that I never thought were there, there is something kind of incredible about the way its simple, straightforward elements – its catchy tunes and its bouncy rhythms – are able to be maintained so continuously, holding your attention, keeping you pumped. Even without chemicals, you find yourself staying on the music’s high.
Nothing ventures very far away from safe, trusted diatonic keys; the rhythms don’t explode in crazy directions that make you feel you need to revolutionise your understanding of traditional mathematics to work out the beat; and you can usually count on one hand the number of chords that you’ll hear on any track. And yet it keeps you engaged, it keeps you going and you find it’s embarrassingly easy to give into the temptation to listen to “just one more song”. Even the most self-assuredly sophisticated music critic would have to acknowledge that it takes more than just good marketing to make so much out of so little.
When I listen to all these songs, and even to the more varied and adventurous later album, Like a Prayer, I can’t help but be reminded of what someone once said of Vivaldi – that he didn’t write hundreds of concertos, but rather wrote the same concerto hundreds of times. But even hundreds of years later, people are still listening to most of those Vivaldi Concertos, and not just in lifts, or when they’re on hold on the phone, either. There’s undoubtedly a place in everyone’s world for things that are just fun – American sitcoms, chocolate, cricket in the backyard and, let’s admit it, even Vivaldi and Madonna.
It has been an unnerving experience. As Madonna’s second and possibly most popular album, Like a Virgin, blares through my speakers, and as I contemplate what on earth the neighbours must think of me, I find, totally against my will or power, that I am bopping and dancing around the house, looking for (but thankfully not finding) the itsy-bitsy shorts I used to wear to dance parties, where the right mix of chemicals was able to make both my body and my dancing much more presentable than either were even then, let alone now.
There’s something pretty sinister about this music, the way it makes you do these things you wouldn’t normally do – twisting and jumping in ways that you never would think you would do, singing along to songs that you never would admit to knowing; the way it makes you forget your old, tired, decrepit bones and joints, and perform all those dance manoeuvres that are probably actually responsible for your current state of orthopaedic ruin.
While I’m not going to pretend that I have found new depths in this music or new dimensions that I never thought were there, there is something kind of incredible about the way its simple, straightforward elements – its catchy tunes and its bouncy rhythms – are able to be maintained so continuously, holding your attention, keeping you pumped. Even without chemicals, you find yourself staying on the music’s high.
Nothing ventures very far away from safe, trusted diatonic keys; the rhythms don’t explode in crazy directions that make you feel you need to revolutionise your understanding of traditional mathematics to work out the beat; and you can usually count on one hand the number of chords that you’ll hear on any track. And yet it keeps you engaged, it keeps you going and you find it’s embarrassingly easy to give into the temptation to listen to “just one more song”. Even the most self-assuredly sophisticated music critic would have to acknowledge that it takes more than just good marketing to make so much out of so little.
When I listen to all these songs, and even to the more varied and adventurous later album, Like a Prayer, I can’t help but be reminded of what someone once said of Vivaldi – that he didn’t write hundreds of concertos, but rather wrote the same concerto hundreds of times. But even hundreds of years later, people are still listening to most of those Vivaldi Concertos, and not just in lifts, or when they’re on hold on the phone, either. There’s undoubtedly a place in everyone’s world for things that are just fun – American sitcoms, chocolate, cricket in the backyard and, let’s admit it, even Vivaldi and Madonna.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The history of everything in just 16 hours
It would be a travesty, a sacrilege, for me to run a music blog and to never mention the piece of music that, for me, has always overwhelmed, surpassed, and outshone everything else that has ever been created. Not to mention that fact that I would never go to Valhalla when I die.
I freely admit that it’s a bit cheeky to include Richard Wagner’s mammoth operatic quadrilogy Der Ring des Nibelungen as a single entry in a music blog – but Wagner did always conceive it as a single work and I have been listening to it today so, somehow, I reckon it qualifies.
Wagner’s Ring is, in fact, four operas or, to be strictly correct, it is 'A Festival Stage Play for Three Days and a Preliminary Evening'. The ‘Preliminary Evening’ is Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), and the three days are, respectively, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie -a valkyrie being a generally large breasted woman dressed in battle armour with horns sticking out of her head), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). It’s a massive tale about the beginning of the world and its end – a tale where gods and giants and ugly subterranean dwarves mingle with mortals and demigods and mermaids and warrior maidens and a dragon and all kinds of things, battling over a golden ring that has been fashioned out of a piece of purely and innocently beautiful gold but that has, in being so fashioned, become the vehicle for world domination. Everyone lusts after it. Anyone who has read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings will know that the whole thing ends in a cataclysm of fire but that, out of the fire, a new and redeemed world is born.
But it’s not the story that people remember the Ring for. It’s the music. It begins with an almost sub-audible, sustained E flat from the double basses, which have had to tune their strings down a semitone to play even the first note of the score, giving it a watery, primeval, subconscious sort of feel. From there, another note is added, and then another and, for what seems like an eternity, you feel yourself swimming amidst the universal consciousness of an E flat chord.
And then, 16 hours later, you find that the music has taken you from the beginning of time to its end, capturing every height and depth of human experience – the love, the hate, the rage, the peace, the beauty, the ugliness. You travel down mine shafts where a cacophony of anvils pound away; your climb a rainbow bridge into the heavens to music of psychedelic richness; you fall in love to music where unutterable tenderness walks hand in hand with unspeakable sadness; you see people die unjustly, and you feel the rage of everything you hoped for going wrong, all told in a sad and twisting phrase on the cellos; you fly through the air carrying the bodies of dead warriors with grotesque glee, squealing and howling to music that really does sound like horses galloping on the clouds; you feel the boisterousness of male adolescence, and you sit under the shade of a tree in the forest; you discover sex on a mountain top, with a sky so blue and brittle that you dare not look at it. You hear gloomy prophecies about the end of everything and then you watch it happen, played out before your eyes, where everything collapses because of human greed and malice but where, even out of the rubble, love is resurrected, and thrives, to soaring violins that transport you to eternity, and lay you to rest at the same time.
But, most of all, all of this is brought to you in music of such incredible power and eloquence that you are almost afraid to let it take hold of you because you know, once you do, you will be in its grip forever.
Wagner builds all of this through the simplest of devices – he assigns little phrases of music to this or that idea, to this or that person or place or thing, and then welds them all together with incredible ingenuity and artistry, so that a simple downward scale, representing the authority and law of the gods, makes you sit up and shudder whenever you hear it; or so that, when you hear the majestic harmonies of the Valhalla theme behind Sieglinde's sad tale of her wedding day, you know that the strange old man who walked into the festivities and looked at her, and glared at the others, was Wotan, the king of the gods.
He uses his ginormous orchestra to the full - every instrument getting, at some stage or another, its place in the sun, showing its colours, or all them blending together in the titanic force of those big, loud, steam-rolling passages for which Wagner was so famous.
It’s unfortunate, if not entirely unjustified, that Wagner’s music has become associated with some really bad stuff – Hitler, neurosis, excess, helicopters – but, even so, people keep coming back to it, and I suspect they do so simply because it is just so, so, so good. As Mark Twain famously said, Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds. If you listen to it without prejudice, it will make every hair on your body stand on end. It will make you cry. It will give you nightmares. It will make you ring up someone dear to you and tell them that you love them. It will make you treasure our planet and it will make you treasure the people who share it with you. And, most of all, it will make you marvel at the power of music and at the way that music can muster its resources to say almost anything at all.
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen isn’t something you play on your iPod while you negotiate your way through your local public transport fiascos. Nor is it something that you go along to at your local Opera House, dressed in your respectable finery, applauding politely, and with dignity, at the end. It’s something you listen to with passion, with gusto, prepared for the possibility that your heart and your guts will be shredded and squeezed and twisted and tortured in the process.
But, by time everything comes to an end with an all-embracing, all-releasing, D flat major chord, you know that somehow or other Wagner has put back together everything he pulled apart.
It took Wagner 25 years to write the Ring, and it will take you a good 16 hours to listen to it. But where else could you hope to find the beginning and the end of all things squeezed into such a teensy-weensy bit of time?
I freely admit that it’s a bit cheeky to include Richard Wagner’s mammoth operatic quadrilogy Der Ring des Nibelungen as a single entry in a music blog – but Wagner did always conceive it as a single work and I have been listening to it today so, somehow, I reckon it qualifies.
Wagner’s Ring is, in fact, four operas or, to be strictly correct, it is 'A Festival Stage Play for Three Days and a Preliminary Evening'. The ‘Preliminary Evening’ is Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), and the three days are, respectively, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie -a valkyrie being a generally large breasted woman dressed in battle armour with horns sticking out of her head), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). It’s a massive tale about the beginning of the world and its end – a tale where gods and giants and ugly subterranean dwarves mingle with mortals and demigods and mermaids and warrior maidens and a dragon and all kinds of things, battling over a golden ring that has been fashioned out of a piece of purely and innocently beautiful gold but that has, in being so fashioned, become the vehicle for world domination. Everyone lusts after it. Anyone who has read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings will know that the whole thing ends in a cataclysm of fire but that, out of the fire, a new and redeemed world is born.
But it’s not the story that people remember the Ring for. It’s the music. It begins with an almost sub-audible, sustained E flat from the double basses, which have had to tune their strings down a semitone to play even the first note of the score, giving it a watery, primeval, subconscious sort of feel. From there, another note is added, and then another and, for what seems like an eternity, you feel yourself swimming amidst the universal consciousness of an E flat chord.
And then, 16 hours later, you find that the music has taken you from the beginning of time to its end, capturing every height and depth of human experience – the love, the hate, the rage, the peace, the beauty, the ugliness. You travel down mine shafts where a cacophony of anvils pound away; your climb a rainbow bridge into the heavens to music of psychedelic richness; you fall in love to music where unutterable tenderness walks hand in hand with unspeakable sadness; you see people die unjustly, and you feel the rage of everything you hoped for going wrong, all told in a sad and twisting phrase on the cellos; you fly through the air carrying the bodies of dead warriors with grotesque glee, squealing and howling to music that really does sound like horses galloping on the clouds; you feel the boisterousness of male adolescence, and you sit under the shade of a tree in the forest; you discover sex on a mountain top, with a sky so blue and brittle that you dare not look at it. You hear gloomy prophecies about the end of everything and then you watch it happen, played out before your eyes, where everything collapses because of human greed and malice but where, even out of the rubble, love is resurrected, and thrives, to soaring violins that transport you to eternity, and lay you to rest at the same time.
But, most of all, all of this is brought to you in music of such incredible power and eloquence that you are almost afraid to let it take hold of you because you know, once you do, you will be in its grip forever.
Wagner builds all of this through the simplest of devices – he assigns little phrases of music to this or that idea, to this or that person or place or thing, and then welds them all together with incredible ingenuity and artistry, so that a simple downward scale, representing the authority and law of the gods, makes you sit up and shudder whenever you hear it; or so that, when you hear the majestic harmonies of the Valhalla theme behind Sieglinde's sad tale of her wedding day, you know that the strange old man who walked into the festivities and looked at her, and glared at the others, was Wotan, the king of the gods.
He uses his ginormous orchestra to the full - every instrument getting, at some stage or another, its place in the sun, showing its colours, or all them blending together in the titanic force of those big, loud, steam-rolling passages for which Wagner was so famous.
It’s unfortunate, if not entirely unjustified, that Wagner’s music has become associated with some really bad stuff – Hitler, neurosis, excess, helicopters – but, even so, people keep coming back to it, and I suspect they do so simply because it is just so, so, so good. As Mark Twain famously said, Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds. If you listen to it without prejudice, it will make every hair on your body stand on end. It will make you cry. It will give you nightmares. It will make you ring up someone dear to you and tell them that you love them. It will make you treasure our planet and it will make you treasure the people who share it with you. And, most of all, it will make you marvel at the power of music and at the way that music can muster its resources to say almost anything at all.
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen isn’t something you play on your iPod while you negotiate your way through your local public transport fiascos. Nor is it something that you go along to at your local Opera House, dressed in your respectable finery, applauding politely, and with dignity, at the end. It’s something you listen to with passion, with gusto, prepared for the possibility that your heart and your guts will be shredded and squeezed and twisted and tortured in the process.
But, by time everything comes to an end with an all-embracing, all-releasing, D flat major chord, you know that somehow or other Wagner has put back together everything he pulled apart.
It took Wagner 25 years to write the Ring, and it will take you a good 16 hours to listen to it. But where else could you hope to find the beginning and the end of all things squeezed into such a teensy-weensy bit of time?
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